Release Highlights, as of December 7, 2017
The New Year is a little more than three weeks away, and we’re working to get more functionality out before the ball drops.
As always, you can see the latest features and fixes on the SAP Community Release Notes wiki page, but I wanted to highlight the following items, available as of now:
Tag picker: There’s an entire blog post dedicated to this much-needed feature, so I recommend you check that out while I summarize here. (And by summarize, I mean steal from a bullet list from there.) In brief: Finding the right tag for blog posts and questions has been a common challenge for members. To simplify selection, the new tag picker:
- Ranks the most relevant tags on top
- Supports synonyms, acronyms, and abbreviations
- Recognizes outdated product names
- Searches all terms in a query
- Works around typos in a query
- Displays breadcrumbs instead of hierarchy
That’s not the only improvement to the tagging experience. Besides implementing the enhanced tag picker, we’ve also reduced the set of available tags in the tag picker based on an evaluation of the quality and quantity of tags on existing content. With fewer (and less confusing) tags to choose from when creating content, we expect to see improvements in content engagement and discovery.
Email subscriptions for tagged content: You now have the option to subscribe to two new email notification types: one that notifies you when a blog has been posted with a tag that you follow and another that notifies you when a question has been asked with a tag that you follow. If you’re interested in receiving them, simply go to your Former Member and subscribe to the appropriate email notification (as shown below and as described in the “Email Notifications from SAP Community” blog post). Please note that these new email subscriptions are the first phase in a three-phase approach that will make more and more email notification types available further down the road. For even more information about activities and notifications, please see the Activity Stream and Notifications page.
Several bug fixes were also made with this release. One addressed a problem that generated a great deal of conversation recently. In summation: When someone changed a tag for a question, the system treated all of the comments and answers for that question as new activity — so subscribers would get updates for all of this content. Now, whenever the tag is changed, subscribers will only get a single update about this action as expected.
Those are the highlights for the current release cycle, but we aren’t finished with 2017 just yet. We have other improvements scheduled to roll out in the coming weeks. I’ll stop short of saying more — lest I end up with coal in my stocking for fibbing– but I hope to be back soon with a cool announcement.
In the meantime, you can continue to find a convenient list of all release highlights (as well as other communications) in the Community Updates section. You can also “watch” the SAP Community: Communications Updates wiki page (option in the upper right) to get notifications whenever news occurs.
Woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!! Improvements - I love it. I'll read the tag blog. I'm hoping it won't be difficult to follow.
Happy snowy day!
Michelle
Slow and steady wins the race! All the best to you and team, Jerry!
Regards,
Kumud
Much awaited 🙂
Am I the only one who struggles to think that if you are following more than a tag or two, you would be crazy (or simply love emails) to enable this new setting for either blogs or answers?
I enabled it for questions, but had to turn it off as I was being flooded. It was the expected result, but I wanted to test it out. It works as advertised, but I guess I just follow too many tags for it to have value to me. Going to try the blogs next. Volume should be much less, so perhaps it will be useful, particularly as a Moderator working to keep the quality of the content up.
In the 'phased approach' the team takes for these enhancements, we presently have the ability to follow as many tags as we desire (I follow 11 tags, but you are likely on the high side of quantity followed due to all the tags you moderate). As Sajid Amir shared you can now switch them off in your profile, but the email setting for blogs and/or q&a is an all or nothing floodgate as you experienced.
As we have greatly reduced the number of tags and will have more grouping in the future, we need to give greater purpose and granularity to the tag configuration options for following, emails, etc.
Hello Jeremy, thanks for your comments. Unfortunately we had to make the decision to roll this out in its early stage instead of waiting to incorporate such granularity for user preferences. However, the next phases of improvements for this work stream will integrate exactly what you are requesting. In addition to other improvements users will be able to choose which tags they would like to receive new content email notifications for.
Perfect - thank you for articulating the go forward plan! When I put the single quotes around 'phased approach' it was a little vague, but sometimes where I personally struggle the most is seeing the bigger picture since we quite often receive the v1 release with future enhancements that are not always transparent or clear as to the intended final product.
Hi Sajid Amir - has there been any update on the 'next phases of improvements for this work stream'? Jerry Janda kindly tied this recent post back to this thread, so I was hoping for a status check, either here or in the project Jam site.
Thanks for the update, Jerry!
I think, there's nothing in for me this time(I don't use e-mail notifications and had no problem tagging my blogs) but others seem to like it / benefit, so that's great!
(What I did notice, is that "Most Liked Blogs" and "Latest Blogs" now also show the Tag - I like that!)
best
Joachim
Does the phased approach include email notifications for blogs that I follow? Following a blog seems pretty useless without that feature....